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COSHOCTON COUNTY, OHIO

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BIOGRAPHIES

Source:
HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS of
COSHOCTON COUNTY, OHIO 1764-1876

by William E. Hunt. - Publ. Cincinnati - Robert Clarke & Co., Printers
1876

Unless otherwise noted

CHAPTER XIX.
MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS.

THE PRE-HISTORIC RACE.
pg. 159

     DODDRIDGE, in his "Notes on the Settlement of Western Pennsylvania and Virginia," etc., says, touching the earth forts, mounds, grave-yards, stone-hatchets, and other evidences of a race preceding the Indians.
     "Most writers represent these as peculiar to America; but the fact is, they are also in Europe and Asia.  Large groups of mounds are met with in many places between Moscow and St. Petersburgh), in Russia.  When the people of that country are asked if they have any tradition concerning them, they answer in the negative.  They suppose they are the graves of men slain in battle, but when or by whom constructed they have no knowledge.  Nearly all the mounds which have been opened in Asia and America have been found to contain more or less charcoal and calcined bones.  Some have thought that these mounds were used for altars for sacrifice, the offerings being the prisoners taken in battle.  The great antiquity of these relics can not be questioned.   A curious fact is that they are not found in any great numbers along the shores of the main oceans.  This circumstance goes to show that those by whom they were made were not in the practice of navigating the great seas. That they contain nothing with even hieroglyphics is evidence of a high antiquity. An-

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other evidence of the great age of these rude remains of antiquity is that there is not even a regular traditionary account of their origin."
     Doddridge gives reasons at length for rejecting the idea that there was any considerable degree of civilization among the people making them.  He is inclined to think they were of Asiatic origin, though not holding the idea that they were "the lost tribes of Israel."  He is not so wild as some in his estimates of their numbers, wanting something more than one swallow to make a summer, and not familiar with or disposed to accept the processes of the modern anti-biblical "scientists," who made so much out of that tremendous "sell," the Cardiff giant, to disparage the scriptural account of man.

ANCIENT BURIAL GROUNDS.

     " In the county of Coshocton, as we pass west on the Pan-Handle railroad, three miles or thereabouts from the county-seat, is seen to the right a large plain in the river bend of several hundred acres, and on the east bank of the river, a few hundred yards distant, a large mound, forty feet high, with trees thereon.  In its vicinity, Zeisberger settled Lichtenau, in 1776, and he was attracted to the spot from the numerous evidences of an ancient race having been buried there, more civilized than the Indians of his day.  The missionaries have left but meager details of what they there found, but enough to clearly prove that its inhabitants understood the use of the ax, the making of pottery, and division of areas of land in squares, etc.  In a large grave yard, which covered many acres, human bones or skeletons were found, less in stature than the average Indian by a foot and a half.  They were regularly buried in rows, heads west and feet east, as indicated by the enameled teeth in preservation, so that the disembodied spirits, on coming out of the graves, would first see the rising sun, and make their proper devotional gestures to their great Spirit or God.  From approximate measurement this grave-yard contained ten acres, and has long since been plowed up and turned

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into corn-fields.  The race of beings buried there averaged four feet in height, judging from the size of the graves and layers of ashes.  Estimating that twenty bodies could be buried in a square rod, this human sepulcher, if full, would have contained over thirty thousand bodies, and the ordinary time required to fill such a grave-yard would not be less than five hundred years in a city the size of Coshocton of the present day, assuming that the generations averaged thirty-three years of life.  One skeleton dug up from this grave-yard is said to have measured five and one-half feet, and the skull to have been perforated by a bullet.  The body had been dismembered, and iron nails and a decayed piece of oak were found in the grave.
     "On the farm of a Mr. Long, about fifteen miles southwest of St. Louis, was found, many years ago, an ancient burying-ground, containing a vast number of small graves, indicating that the country around had once been the seat of a great population of human beings of less than ordinary size, similar in every respect to those found near Coshocton.  But, on opening the graves, they found the skeletons deposited in stone coffins, while those at Coshocton bore evidence of having been buried in wooden coffins.  After opening many of the graves, all having in them skeletons of a pigmy race, they at length found one, as at Coshocton, denoting a full-developed, large-sized man, except in length, the legs having been cut off at the knees and placed alongside the thighbones.  From this fact many scientific men conjectured that there must have been a custom among the inhabitants of separating the bones of' the body before burial, and that accounted for the small size of the graves. The skeletons, however, were reduced to white chalky ashes, and therefore it was impossible to determine whether such a custom existed or not.
     "A custom is said to have existed among certain tribes of the western Indians to keep their dead unburied until the flesh separated from the bones; and when the bones became clean and white, they were buried in small coffins.  The Nanticoke Indians of Maryland had a custom of exhuming their dead after some months of burial, cutting off

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from the bones all the flesh and burning it, then drying and wrapping the bones in clean cloths, and reburying them; and, whenever the tribe removed to new hunting-grounds, the bones of their dead were taken along.  It is known that this tribe removed to Western Pennsylvania, and portions of them came to the Muskingum valley with the Shawanese.  Zeisberger had two Nanticoke converts at Schoenbrunn, and one of whom (named Samuel Nanticoke) affirmed—as tradition goes—that this pigmy grave-yard at Lichtenau was their burying-ground, and contained the bones of their ancestors, carried from one place to another for many generations, and found a final resting place in these valleys, when their posterity became too weak, from the wastage of war, to remove them elsewhere."—Mitchener's Ohio Annals.
     When the Walhonding canal was being built, a number of skeletons in the sitting posture were unearthed.  On the Powelson place, just east of the town of Coshocton, a skeleton was dug up, having upon the head a curious shaped metallic cap or earthen-ware vase.  It was forwarded to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, by Rev. Wm. E. Hunt, in 1869.

MEANING OF THE NAMES MUSKINGUM, TUSCARAWAS, AND WALHONDING.

     The Tuscarawas river was long embraced with the Muskingum river, as we now call it, under the one designation - the Muskingum extending from Marietta to the headwaters in Summit county.  Afterward the Tuscarawas was called the "Little Muskingum."  The best accredited meaning of the name Muskingum is "Elk's Eye" - the emblem of placid, quiet beauty.
     Tuscarawas, according to Heckewelder (as good authority as any in these things), means "Old Town," the oldest Indian town in South-eastern Ohio being on it near the present Bolivar.
     The Walhonding is, with unvarying testimony, said to mean "The White Woman."

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PROSE LEGEND OF THE WALHONDING.

     Christopher Gist, when looking uplands for George Washington's Virginia Land Company, was at "White Woman's Town," Jan. 14, 1751.  He says the town (it stood near the junction of Killbuck and White Woman creeks) was so called from the fact that the ruling spirit in it was a white woman, who had been taken captive in New England, when she was not above ten years of age, by the French Indians, and had subsequently become the wife of "Eagle Feather."  She is reported as having been one of the "strong-minded " of her day, and " wore the leggins."  She had several children, and was even outstripping the Indian in Indian qualities.  Her name was Mary Harris.  According to this story, the river was named from the town.  Those who prefer this account to the more poetic, and perhaps equally truthful, one given in the chapter of this work entitled " Indian Occupancy," can do so without hurting the feelings of the writer of the book, who has not talent nor time to settle conflicting Indian legends.

HECKEWELDER'S GREAT RIDE.

 

 

 

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A TEMPERANCE CRUSADE AMONG THE INDIANS.

 

 

 

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the snow, as Jones states in his journal, some four to five feet deep." - Mitchener's Ohio Annals.

THE GNADENHUTTEN MASSACRE.

     Although this was not an event taking place in Coshocton county, yet had to do with it, and the occurrence bore important relations to the Indians whose cherished seat was once in Coshocton county, and to the settlement of the county, a brief account is here given.
     1781, the Moravian Indians were required to abandon the Tuscarawas valley mission stations and repair to Detroit.  Amid the rigors of the winter they were taken to Sandusky and there held for a time.  A scarcity of provisions was, however, soon felt in the new location, and in February, 1782, about a hundred and fifty of the Indians returned from the Sandusky region to the Tuscarawas region to get supplies of corn which had been raised the season before, and left in the field unhusked.  While they were husking and gathering the com they took up their residence again in Gnadenhutten and Salem.
     Meanwhile the settlers in Western Pennsylvania were experiencing some great outrages at the hands of some red skins.  A band had attacked the home of a man named Wallace, murdered his wife and five children, impaling one of the children with its face toward the settlements and its belly toward the Indian country, and had carried off' John Carpenter as a prisoner.  In the latter part of 1781, the militia of the frontier came to a determination to break up the Moravian villages on the Tuscarawas.  For this purpose, a detachment of men, under the command of Colonel Williamson, avowing only the determination to make the Indians move further away or taking them prisoners to Fort Pitt.  When they reached Gnadenhutten they found but few Indians, the removal of most of them to Sandusky having already been effected.  A few were captured and taken to Fort Pitt and delivered to the commandant there, who, after a short detention, sent them home again.  This procedure greatly displeased the settlers, who were demand

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DESCRIPTION OF THE HUBNTING-SHIRT.

 

 

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HOW TO RAISE A LARGE FAMILY

 

INDIAN STORIES.

 

 

 

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BACKWOODS SPORTS.

 

 

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